Martial Arts

(Thanh Sói - Cúc dại trong đêm

dir: Veronica Ngo

2023

Way, way back in the day, the only place on Earth regularly pumping out quality martial arts movies was Hong Kong. Wasn’t even close, Sure, plenty of other shmucks were trying to do the same thing, but it was embarrassing. Stop it, you’d feel like saying, sitting through one of their ghastly knockoffs, you’re embarrassing yourselves and your country.

Eventually, the skills transfer occurred in filmmaking, in the same way that British control of Hong Kong transferred to the totalitarian Communist regime in China, and other countries buffed up their film productions so that a great martial arts epic can come from anywhere.

Indonesia, India, France, now even Vietnam. Still, not Australia. Never Australia.

Furies is a brutal and highly competent martial arts flick from Vietnam. It is a prequel to the most successful flick in Vietnamese box office history, which uses the singular Furie as a title, which makes absolutely no sense to me, but I doubt that’s the title in Vietnamese.

Before my involvement here I can honestly say I’d only ever watched one Vietnamese flick previously. It was called Cyclo, back in the 90s, and about the only things I can remember about it is that it had Radiohead’s Creep on the soundtrack, which many 90s flicks were obligated to have, and it was quite moody and boring, like the average teenager.

That being said, I have seen plenty of flicks about English people, Americans and Australians in Vietnam. Most of those weren’t shot in Vietnam, and they weren’t about Vietnam. They were about how brave and heroic everyone else was in trying to “save” the Vietnamese from the scourge of Communism.

How’d that work out for you, champs?

dir: Gareth Huw Evans

How bizarre. A Welsh director travels to Indonesia to make a brutal action flick that seems like it’s from Hong Kong in the 1980s.

For his next flick maybe he should make a movie where a one-legged ballerina swordfights with narwhals on Pluto as Gary Numan plays maracas in the background, set during the Victorian era.

Maybe it’s not that bizarre. I guess it’s just a straight-ahead very violent action flick coming from a place I wouldn’t expect to produce such things.

It’s enjoyable if you like brutal flicks where a guy, or a couple of guys, fight against a horde of enemies with the thin sliver of hope of ever surviving. Even though a lot of people get shot, that’s just the hors d’oeuvre. The reason people’s arses are in those theatre seats is, presumably, to watch fist and foot mercilessly meet with face and groin, many, many times.

dir: Tsui Hark
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Some directors win their way back into our good graces by making a transformative leap in their filmmaking in order to deliver a great film after decades of slumming. Other directors delight or depress us by consistently putting out the same kind of film, year after year, Woody, decade after decade.

Other directors win us over again by going way back in style and intent, and delivering the kind of flick they delivered way back when they were still making good flicks.

Tsui Hark’s great claim to fame is, in my opinion, being part of that new wave of Hong Kong film in the late 80s – early 90s which reminded the rest of the world that Hong Kong was still making some awesome action flicks. Along with the John Woo flicks The Killer and Hard Boiled, Hark’s Once Upon a Time in China flicks were part of that vanguard reinvading the West with hyperactive action and a complete disregard for the safety of stuntpeople that blew the tender sensibilities of audiences away all over again.

Of course, with success comes money, hookers and moving to Hollywood to make horrible flicks with Jean Claude Van Damme and Dennis Rodman, which will kill your career if there’s any justice in the universe.

dir: James McTeigue

Wow. I haven’t seen a flick with as many meaty chunks flying around since the last time I took a trip to a slaughterhouse, or perhaps Easter Sunday lunch at my parent’s place. There’s substantially less mooing going on here, but all the same, the majority of the people who appear onscreen are here only to end up as chunks of meat on the floor for our entertainment.

That is what we are, after all. Maybe there’s something depressing about seeing visual (and entirely computer generated) representations of the essential meatiness of our bodies. Rendered down into our component parts, everything we were and ever will be, annihilated like that, well, it’s pretty confronting.

At least for a while. This decidedly substandard action movie opens with a bunch of yakuza thugs exploding into discrete piles o’chunks, at the hands, blades and shurikens of unseen, shadowy assassins. In other words, there must be murderous ninjas afoot!

The heyday of the ninja flick was definitely the 80s. At no other time has there been as much of a market for the endless permutations of the magically murderous character, which is why we had, for an all too brief, halcyon period, a stream of ninja related action flicks. For reasons I haven’t expended and won’t expend brain power on, the ninja sub-genre appealed to American audiences, leading to this procession of flicks starring obviously non-Japanese people as experts in ninjitsu, and the art of assassination and deception. Not for nothing did men like Franco Nero and Michael Dudikoff become household names.

What do you mean, they didn’t? Surely almost everyone in Christendom and Buddhisdom, for that matter, watched everything from Enter the Ninja to Silent Assassin to American Ninja 5: The Re-ninja-ing? They didn’t? Well, what were they busy doing, building treehouses, setting off bottle rockets or building crystal meth labs instead?

I don’t know if I’m at all glad that they’re bringing this genre back again. Like Michael Jackson, it had its time and place, and probably doesn’t merit resurrection. It feels uncomfortably like coming home and finding your significant other in flagrante delicto which Chuck Norris. Tell me seeing him on his hands and knees with someone else in deep up to their elbow wouldn’t be the most retro yet disturbing thing you ever saw in your life.